The village of Santa Catarina Minas, a 25-mile drive south from the city of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, doesn’t look like much. There is among its dusty streets a small church, a snack bar, a convenience store and, to the casual traveler, apparently little else. But this former center of gold and silver mining has become a pilgrimage site for spirit fanatics, sometimes called the “cradle of mezcal,” known for producing some of the most celebrated agave distillates in Mexico.
At Real Minero, among its most famous palenques, as Oaxaca’s small mezcal distilleries are known, a bountiful garden showcases the rich diversity of agave plants from which mezcal can be made, each variety imparting to the final spirit a distinctive vegetal profile. Upright cuishe as narrow as fence posts; broad-bellied tobalá; blue-green tepeztate with wide, spiky leaves, all surrounded by cacti and other plants indigenous to this dry mountain region. “We brought the mountain here, to recreate the environment where these agaves grow in the wild,” says Matías Domínguez Laso, Real Minero’s wiry consulting biologist, who tends the garden.
We’re touring the property in late spring. Domínguez Laso, protected from the sun in khaki field gear and a floppy hat, points out among rows of maturing agave plants a few towering quiotes. These reproductive stalks, jutting as high as 30 feet in the air, shoot up from agave plants at the end of their life cycle after 10 or 15 or 20-plus years—a last gasp at immortality. Soon the quiotes will bloom with tiny flowers, and then the lesser long-nosed bats will arrive. Come nightfall in spring and summer these migratory bats, primary pollinators for many agave species, throng flowering quiotes across Mexico, dipping in their pointy snouts and elongated tongues to lap up nectar and spreading genetic material as they move from one plant to the next.
For millennia these bats have played a key role in propagating Mexico’s wide range of agaves, hardy succulents able to survive in desert conditions on minimal water. “Without bats, there would be no agave,” Rodrigo Medellín, Mexico’s foremost bat biologist, explained later. “This is a 10- to 12-million-year-old story—it’s a love story. As agave started developing, evolutionarily, the plants would get more and more sugar in the core, and then at the end of their life they invest every ounce of that sugar into one single sexual reproductive event. And then they grow the flowering stalk, they open their arms like that, inviting the pollinators, feeding them crazily—and then they die.”
But the flowers are late this year, and so are the bats. “Because of global warming, agave behaviors are changing, quiotes are growing earlier than usual or later than usual,” says Graciela Ángeles Carreño, a fourth-generation mezcalera who took over operations of Real Minero after her father, Lorenzo Ángeles Mendoza, died in 2016. The bats, once listed as endangered in the United States and threatened in Mexico, have come back from the brink after years of conservation efforts. But a breakdown in the historic relationship between agave plants and this primary pollinator is just one of many factors threatening the long-term ecological health of Mexico’s mezcal-making regions.
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This article is a selection from the September/October 2024 issue of Smithsonian magazine
Agave plants that are used to produce mezcal and its more industrialized cousin, tequila—which is made from a single agave variety, known as Agave tequilana—are exclusively harvested before they flower, ideally just as the quiote begins to develop. Cutting off the flowering stalk before it shoots up helps concentrate the sugars in the piña, or pineapple, the dense heart of the plant, ensuring there’s plenty of rich nectar, after roasting and crushing, for distillation.
In Oaxaca, where most of Mexico’s mezcal is produced, harvesters have traditionally left a few plants to mature until they flower, sacrificing precious mezcal material to keep their agave lines going, and collecting seeds from the stalks for replanting after bat pollination. But the tremendous recent demand for agave, following an explosion in mezcal’s popularity—production surged 700 percent between 2011 and 2021, making mezcal one of the fastest-growing spirit categories in the world—has meant fewer quiotes, and fewer bats. And many growers have turned to wide-scale planting of more cost-effective clones of a domesticated agave varietal known as espadín to capitalize on demand.
These genetic copies grow more quickly and efficiently than naturally propagating agave, but they also become increasingly susceptible to disease with each new generation, requiring ever more pesticides and herbicides to stay healthy. “Mother plants that have been cloned and cloned and cloned get smaller and smaller and smaller, and have less and less genetic fortitude,” Domínguez Laso says. “By propagating by seed, we end up with much stronger, hardier plants.”
The espadín clones, planted in neat rows on clear-cut hillsides across Oaxaca, are placing a significant environmental strain on the region, with intensive farming practices that are wiping out trees and using up an increasingly limited water supply. And because the plants are genetically identical, a single blight can eradicate large swaths of a population—something that actually happened, years ago, to tequila plants in the state of Jalisco, a few hundred miles northwest of Oaxaca, where most tequila originates.
Meanwhile, once-abundant wild agaves are harvested en masse before they flower, with little thought to regeneration. Harvesting crews are “told to go out and get as many agaves as possible,” says Gary Paul Nabhan, an ethnobotanist and a co-author of Agave Spirits: The Past, Present and Future of Mezcals, published in 2023. “They don’t have the knowledge the old Indigenous harvesters of wild agave had, but they’re up against an economic wall.” He calls the mezcal boom “enormous compared to historic production.”
With the mezcal world at a crossroads—and an expected global market value exceeding $1.1 billion this year—some mezcaleros are asking themselves how to find a sustainable path forward in the face of extreme growth. “What made Oaxaca different from other regions was a focus on traditions, culture,” Ángeles Carreño says. “We’re losing that now.” The answers may lie in reviving practices that made mezcal distinctive before it became big corporate business.
Agave has long been prized across Mexico, providing sustenance and shelter, the thick sap used as sweetener, the fibrous leaves roasted and eaten, or woven into textiles, or pounded with mud into adobe bricks. But there is no consensus on the origins of agave distillation. A few archaeologists have argued that clay shards discovered at pre-Columbian excavation sites might be the remains of ancient stills, but though the Aztecs and their forebears fermented the sap into a sacred brew, today known as pulque, and worshiped the agave god Mayahuel, most historians believe distillation arrived with the first Europeans.
Scholars have traced a direct line to 16th-century trade routes connecting Mexico’s Pacific coast to Spanish outposts in Asia. Galleons brought over Filipino sailors, enlisted as indentured or enslaved labor, who eventually settled in Mexico, carrying with them coconut palms, along with the technology to distill their sweet sap into an alcoholic beverage that became known locally as vino de coco, coconut wine.
Today clay pot stills, sometimes called Filipino stills, are the favored equipment in Santa Catarina Minas and other villages where they practice the “ancestral method” of mezcal distillation. Copper stills, first brought to Mexico by Spanish aristocrats, are more widespread for industrial production. The basic techniques to make mezcal haven’t changed much in the last 400 or so years. After cutting away the leaves to reveal the piña (so called because it resembles a big, bulbous pineapple), most mezcaleros slow-roast their agave for days in huge underground pits. The blackened husks, leaking caramelized nectar, are then pounded into a pulp, either by hand using wood mallets or under massive stone wheels pulled by horses or mules. The pressed liquid is then fermented with its fibers, generally in big wooden casks, before it’s distilled twice in a wood-fired still.
The earliest 16th-century agave spirits were the low-proof result of a single distillation, often known as vino de mezcal. (“Mezcal” is derived from two Nahuatl words meaning “oven-cooked agave.”) The name was shortened as the spirit evolved. Propelled by a few families like the Cuervos, who began distilling in the mid-1700s, and the Sauzas, who followed a century later, tequila—originally just mezcals made in and near the town of Tequila, in Jalisco state—broke away to become its own thriving category. Small distilleries soon gave way to large industrial facilities. To streamline production, the tequila industry focused on a single cloned agave varietal, Agave tequilana, also known as blue Weber agave, after the French botanist Frédéric Albert Constantin Weber, who identified the species in the early 20th century.
When tequila’s denomination of origin—which protects a product’s cultural and geographic origins from unfair competition—was established, in 1974, blue Weber became the only agave legally authorized for tequila production, leading to seas of genetically identical plants that now blanket the landscape in Jalisco. Bat pollination almost entirely vanished across the region. (Though their migration routes changed, and a key food source was threatened, the bats could subsist on night-blooming flowering cactus plants and sometimes cactus fruit and pollen. “The bats don’t need agave, but agaves need bats,” Domínguez Laso, of Real Minero, tells me.)
In the 1980s, as tequila surged in popularity, riding the international frozen margarita wave, a few scientists, like Nabhan, spoke out about the dangers of relying on a single homogeneous crop. Beginning in 1988, an agave blight wiped out thousands of acres, bankrupting many tequila producers. “A mix of diseases simultaneously attacked the genetically homogeneous clones,” Nabhan tells me. “They called it tristeza y muerte—sadness and death—because the plants begin to look sad and wilt, and then they die.”
Despite the disaster, the tequila industry, rather than diversifying its crop, doubled down on new herbicides and pesticides to shore up their blue Weber against evolving pathogens. “It’s very hard to whip that vicious cycle of trying to add one more herbicide,” Nabhan says. “And then the viruses and bacteria become resistant to that.” Tequilas known as mixtos made up for agave shortfalls by turning to other distilled spirit sources, usually sugar cane or corn syrup—and becoming a source of many wicked spring break hangovers. (By law, only 51 percent of tequila must be made from agave.)
Mezcal, which tends to have a more diverse range of flavors than tequila, with grassy, herbaceous and sometimes smoky notes, has always been distilled entirely from agave, and it remained a largely artisanal product made in backyard palenques. For much of its history, mezcal was considered contraband, like moonshine, and was consumed close to its production site, often for special occasions like baptisms, weddings and birthdays. Village stills were often communal. Distilling was a sideline and rarely legal. “My great-grandfather was a farmer first,” says Ángeles Carreño, whose family has been making mezcal at Real Minero in Santa Catarina Minas for generations. “He made mezcal clandestinely, and my great-grandmother would sell it clandestinely—they were a team.” After Mexican authorities effectively ended the prohibition, in the 1980s, Ángeles Carreño’s father became the first member of the family to make mezcal legally.
Nonetheless, as recently as the early 1990s, there was still little high-quality mezcal being bottled commercially. That changed when Ron Cooper, an American visual artist living in Taos, New Mexico, and an unlikely future mezcal magnate, began spending time in Oaxaca. Cooper, known for his abstract work with light and color, had taken a windfall from a few big art sales and driven south to Oaxaca looking for local weavers to work with. In his spare time, he explored remote mountain villages searching for great mezcal to drink. “I’d show up in a village asking, ‘Where’s the best?’ And they’d point the way, in Zapotec,” he recalls, of those early spirit foraging trips.
He filled empty brandy bottles and plastic soda bottles with the mezcal he sampled from backyard palenques. In the evenings, he’d pour out tastes for a Oaxacan artist friend, who was gobsmacked by the quality. “I’d say, ‘Hey, try this.’ And his jaw would drop. ‘Where’d you get that!?’ I realized that I had unearthed this treasure that had been lost.”
Mezcal became an obsession. In 1995, after the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect and Mexico introduced a denomination of origin for mezcal, Cooper began bottling his discoveries under his own label, Del Maguey Single Village Mezcal, and secured a license for export to the United States. (Maguey is the common name in Mexico for the agave plant.) The first two expressions, from the mountain villages of San Baltazar Chichicápam and San Luis del Río, were among the first artisanal mezcals ever bottled commercially and certainly the first exported. “You don’t find mezcal, mezcal finds you,” Cooper liked to say, borrowing a Mexican phrase. He told his producers to set their own price and later offered them a small piece of the company.
Steve Olson, a prominent wine and spirits consultant, writer and educator, who joined Del Maguey as an adviser and eventually became a partner, describes the operation as a sort of talent scout. “We’re like an art gallery, and the mezcaleros are the artists. The liquid goes from their still into a green bottle, and that’s it—we bring it to the world the way we found it.”
One unseasonably hot spring afternoon, I drive to San Baltazar Chichicápam with Gabriel Bonfanti, Del Maguey’s director of sustainability. Bonfanti, a laid-back hippie with a ponytail and a Taos expat himself, moved to Oaxaca nine years ago. Not long afterward, Cooper, then in his 70s, sold Del Maguey to the multinational spirits giant Pernod Ricard. Bonfanti now acts as a stand-in for Cooper on the ground, a link to the founding ethos of a company that’s become mezcal’s biggest corporate player.
In San Baltazar Chichicápam, we meet Faustino Garcia Vasquez, who was among the first mezcaleros to sign on with the company almost 30 years ago. Under Cooper’s leadership, Del Maguey tried to make as few changes as possible to traditional production methods. Even today, as part of a global spirits behemoth, Garcia Vasquez, now 65, a lean and muscular man with a pencil-thin mustache, makes mezcal as he always has, in a ramshackle palenque surrounded by turkeys and goats. “Here we are doing all the work—it’s where everything happens,” he says, crouched over his wood-fired copper still in a blue tank top and big black hat. He’s been working alone all morning, he says. His assistant never showed up.
“¿Quieres ayuda?” asks Bonfanti. Want help?
“¡Sí!” Garcia Vasquez replies. He’s got three batches of mezcal to process.
We unload spent bagazo, crushed agave fibers, from fermentation casks using pitchforks, lifting the soggy waste and transferring it by wheelbarrow to a compost pile in the corner of the property. We fill plastic buckets with the fermented liquid left behind, lugging it up to the mouth of the still, where it will begin the first distillation.
In between loads, we drink shots of Garcia Vasquez’s potent, smoke-tinged mezcal. We toast in Zapotec, “Stigibeu!” (stee-gee-BAY-oo), thanking the earth for its bounty by pouring out a few drops before we drink.
“Some people like to say that mezcal was always pretty sustainable on a small-scale level,” Bonfanti says. “All the materials they could use or recycle they did, because there was value in that. You didn’t need to go out and purchase something else.”
But maintaining traditional distillation and farming practices becomes increasingly difficult as volumes scale up. Del Maguey now works with ten different villages and one very large production facility in the small town of San Luis del Río, focused on its most affordable and accessible mezcal, Vida Clásico, developed for mixing in cocktails.
The mezcal export revolution transformed the region, with every spirit conglomerate clamoring to get into the mezcal game. Local authorities, recognizing the economic promise for a state that remains among the poorest in Mexico, threw their support behind efforts to drive up production. They brought in chemists and biologists to help “modernize tradition,” training mezcaleros in how to improve the quality and safety of the spirits they made, according to Domingo García Garza, a sociologist who has written four books on mezcal.
And to level the playing field, in some small way, with the $11 billion tequila industry, the government encouraged growers to focus on cloned espadín. More than 85 percent of all mezcals are now produced from this domesticated varietal. “Just as tequila chose one type of agave, they wanted mezcal to choose one type,” Ángeles Carreño, of Real Minero, tells me. “They wanted to industrialize mezcal production and compete with tequila.” In abandoning the old ways, she went on, the new generation of mezcaleros are “not understanding the negative impact on biodiversity, the culture we’re losing. They’re excited to be the new rock stars—maestro mezcaleros.”
Among Oaxaca’s artisanal producers, few have the pedigree of the Ángeles family, who have been making mezcal in Santa Catarina Minas since the 19th century, not long after a major accident shut down the mine there. In a village with some 50 palenques, García Garza says, the Ángeles family are “like aristocracy.”
The late patriarch, Lorenzo, initially sold his mezcal with only his name attached, before launching Real Minero, as an official brand, in 2002. “My father wasn’t making mezcal because he wanted to, but because he needed to,” says Ángeles Carreño, one of seven siblings. “One of the big goals of my parents was for all of us to go to college. My great-grandfather had never learned how to read or write.”
Ángeles Carreño, who has a doctorate in rural development, had been working in academia before joining the family business. Lately, she’s been traveling across Mexico researching a book on the history of agave distillation and its many variations. “Depending on the region, the processes might vary widely,” she says. “There’s a lot of creativity.” Her brother Édgar, trained as an architect, now works alongside her, overseeing production as Real Minero’s hands-on mezcalero.
Ten years ago, their eldest brother, Eduardo, known as Lalo, a square-jawed idealist with an agricultural engineering degree, split off following a family rift to launch his own competing mezcal label, Lalocura, a ten-minute walk from Real Minero. His mezcals, highly prized by connoisseurs, are almost impossible to find outside of Oaxaca. Like Real Minero’s bottles, they’re priced at a premium, generally $150 and up. Lalo has become increasingly critical of the direction the mezcal industry is heading. “Promoting mezcal is what is destroying the real mezcal,” he tells me.
Lalocura and Real Minero both offer an idealized vision of what a palenque might look like—manicured operations with tasting rooms, retail shops and organized visits. While Graciela Ángeles Carreño is an outspoken proponent of sustainable mezcal production, Lalo, a bit more radical, has gone even further, creating a closed system on his property, almost entirely self-sustaining, with his own cattle to fertilize the fields, wells to provide water, trees to fire up the stills. The building where he sells bottles from his range, and offers tastings, is constructed from adobe bricks made from agave fibers and mud collected on site. “That’s the way my grandparents did things, it was just the way you lived,” he says, of the world he’s built. “We didn’t invent anything. We are just continuing doing things the old-fashioned way.”
Recently, after years of record growth, mezcal sales across Mexico started to dip. Lalo insists this might be a good thing. “This year we’ve been seeing more quiotes,” he says, “more food for the bats.”
The bats are nothing if not resilient. More than 30 years ago, experts estimated that fewer than 1,000 survived, the consequence of habitat loss, dwindling food sources (partly a result of tequila production) and, according to Medellín, the bat scientist, a widespread villainization of bats: Villagers lumped together blood-sucking vampire bats with more benign species and were intentionally destroying their roosts. “Their biggest threat has always been fear and lack of information,” he says.
Medellín, whom BBC nature broadcaster David Attenborough dubbed the “Bat Man of Mexico,” is infectious in his enthusiasm for the infamous winged creatures, which play an important role in pest control, seed dispersal and plant pollination. He has identified species of bats previously unknown in Mexico, which has one of the world’s most diverse bat populations, encompassing rodent-eating carnivorous bats, fruit bats and insectivorous bats. He first began studying lesser long-nosed bats, also sometimes known as tequila bats, in the 1980s, working alongside zoologist Don Wilson, of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington. In 1994, Medellín launched a conservation program for lesser long-nosed bats with an educational focus—with school programs and radio shows—to get a new generation invested in protecting agave’s primary pollinators. In 2013, they were removed from Mexico’s list of threatened species. But Medellín is still at it.
Every year many female lesser long-nosed bats fly enormous distances to a soaring cave system on a speck of an island along the Pacific Coast, south of Puerto Vallarta, facing some of Mexico’s most exclusive beachfront real estate. Here they mate with available males, which don’t migrate, before departing to give birth to their pups. Late one morning, I rendezvous with Medellín and his students from the National Autonomous University of Mexico at an inland biological research station, piling into our vehicles for the short drive to the coast. Medellín has traveled from his home in Mexico City to check in on two groups of lesser long-nosed bats he has been tracking. He’s hoping to determine whether the two populations—one from as far south as El Salvador, the other from up in the Sonoran desert and across the Arizona border—might cross paths here, and whether the males might mate with both groups.
Claudio Contreras Koob
The island is a quick trip from the beach on a fisherman’s skiff. We unload our equipment in a craggy cove, the dark entrance to the cave up ahead like a wound in the rockface. A powerful, sulfurous odor creeps out from the shadows. I follow Medellín’s students into the cave, our faces wrapped in bandanas, heads strapped with lights, squeezing around one black corner and then another. The passage narrows, and, as we inch forward, the walls start to move. The cave, I realize, is infested with cockroaches. Thousands slither along every surface. Rushing through the corridor, we enter a vast chamber where, in the glare of our headlamps, a riot of bat wings flutter overhead.
Months earlier, Medellín’s students had installed equipment at the mouth of the cave to collect data from bats they had previously tagged. To tag a new crop of bats, they carry a portable ladder, a mesh cage and a long-handled net. Eventually they emerge from the cave having trapped 27 bats. Outside the entrance, sprayed by the incoming tide, they work their way through them, assembly-line-style, wearing rubber gloves and surgical masks, weighing, measuring and electronically tagging each one. Medellín, the last stop for each bat, secures the wings in a fist, propping an index finger under the chin. From a large plastic syringe, he feeds each bat a few drops of sugar water—a stand-in for agave nectar—before setting them free. “These bats couldn’t be nicer,” he says. “Because barely, if ever, they want to bite you.”
By dusk the work is done. Perched on a rock as the tide licks our feet, the entrance to the cave now flooded, Medellín uncorks a bottle of mezcal and passes around shots. Eight years ago, he joined forces with a tequila importer and restaurateur named David Suro Piñera, a transplant from Guadalajara living in Philadelphia, to raise awareness about the important relationship between bats and agave. They developed a program to certify “bat-friendly” bottles of tequila and mezcal, like the Don Mateo de la Sierra mezcal, from the state of Michoacán, that we sip as bats stream out from the cave in search of food as night settles in. Producers that allow 5 percent of their agaves to flower get an official holographic bat-friendly stamp on their bottles. But, so far, bottom-line economics has prevented the program from gaining much traction. Many producers are unwilling to sacrifice even a single agave from their production line. Only eleven producers have signed on so far, six making mezcal and five making tequila.
It’s a shame, Medellín says. In Jalisco, with its orderly fields of cloned agave, as perfectly manicured as Tuscan vineyards, it’s probably too late to adopt sustainable farming practices. Oaxaca may be next, but there are still pockets in mezcal country where traditional, responsible agave agriculture endures. Medellín is hopeful that it’s not too late to find a sustainable path forward. “These bats can fly more than 60 miles from the roost to their foraging grounds, along the way exchanging pollen with so many agaves,” Medellín says. “It’s the perfect way to recover some of the genetic diversity that has been lost.”